Playing To Win: How Sandbox VR’s Founder Invested Everything To Build A New Virtual Reality World

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7 Living Room Table Lamps For Every Style

Lulu and Georgia Moriah Mini Table Lamp

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West Elm Metalized Glass Table Lamp

Incorporate this season’s trendy hue into your living room with an iridescent table lamp. This modern design will instantly add a glam factor to your space. The hourglass-shape lamp base is made from mouth-blown glass and has a pearl finish to give it that shiny look. The whimsical touch is bookended by an antique brass stem and base for a polished finish. The table lamp isn’t only modern in style, but in function too. It features a USB charging port so you can stay connected even while spending time with the family in the living room. Originally on sale for $129, now on sale for $100.

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Anthropologie Lola Glass Table Lamp

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CB2 Halo Globe Table Lamp

If your living room errs more on the side of formal this living room table lamp is the perfect home accessory. Cutting out the traditional lampshade, the globe design is a complete mid-century modern vibe. The floating globe would be just as much of a conversation starter on an end table as it would on the floor. The vintage vibes that the handmade engraved glass shade brings on instantly make the lamp worthy of an elegant room. The diamond-cut texture of the orb will help distribute a soft, textured light throughout the room. Originally on sale for $90, now on sale for $76.

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Wade Logan Sullivan 19.5" Table Lamp

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Jonathan Y 24.5" West Glass LED Table Lamp Clear

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Urban Outfitters Alina Rattan Table Lamp

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Trump's Plan To Destroy NASA Science Laid Bare In FY2020 Budget

One of the perks of being President of the United States of America is that you get to submit your budget recommendations to the US Congress before any decisions are made. While it's up to Congress to make the budget and the President to sign it into law, the recommendations for the next fiscal year are where the administration gets to set their agenda and announce to the world the direction it wants to go in.

Last year, the Trump administration proposed cutting a number of Earth Science missions, ending NASA Astrophysics' flagship mission for the 2020s, WFIRST, and eliminating NASA's Office of Education. Then-acting administrator Robert Lightfoot put out a statement mentioning hard choices and an inability to do everything with a limited budget, but Congress overturned these cuts and restored funding for these programs. This year, the assault is even worse, and has a better chance of succeeding. Here's why.

America has, since the end of World War II, enjoyed its status as a superpower on planet Earth. We invested more than any other nation in fundamental science, including physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, medicine, and space exploration. This investment has paid off in innumerable ways.

• It's raised the standard of living of practically every adult and child in America.
• It's increased the average lifespan of the American population.
• We've eradicated or greatly reduced the impact of large numbers of diseases.
• We've made countless new scientific discoveries and advances, resulting in hundreds of Nobel Prizes.
• And we've taken humanity farther into the Universe — in pictures, data, understanding, and in our physical presence — than ever before.

Every time, the way we've progressed has had a similar story: we chose, as a species and as a nation, to take on a great unsolved problem or unaccomplished task that lay before us. We invested in the infrastructure, person-power, and equipment necessary to rise to whatever challenge lay before us. And, most importantly, we invested with our tax dollars.

We chose to invest a significant portion of our government's expenditures on these endeavors. Basic research, education, and development — not a demand for return on investment — was what enabled our greatest successes, both in science and as a society. If you want to point to the one thing that made America great, this was it. The fact that we were investing in pushing the frontiers of human knowledge, and as a result, we were the first to reap its rewards.

Over time, it's somehow become acceptable to question the value of investing in all of those things: research, education, and development. Science became a favorite target of deficit hawks, with the largest projects and missions receiving the most negative press. This practice goes back many decades, and has led to the United States ceding scientific leadership on many fronts. For example:

• In the 1980s, we were the largest producer of Pu-238: a high-power, long-lived radioisotope ideal for deep space exploration. Today, we don't have enough fuel for new missions, and are producing less than 1 kg/year.
• In the early 1990s, Fermilab's Tevatron was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, and we had plans on pushing the energy frontier: with the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). It was killed by politics, and now CERN's LHC, which is less powerful than the SSC would have been, is the only home of cutting-edge accelerator physics.

• In the early 2000s, there were many plans to kill the Hubble Space Telescope rather than continue servicing and upgrading it. The fourth (and final) servicing mission was eventually performed. Hubble remains, 28 years after launch, humanity's greatest optical observatory.
• And throughout the 2010s, there have been calls to de-orbit the International Space Station and to cancel NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, both citing the large cost of the missions in question.

The budgetary problems of James Webb became well-known in 2011, even though the overwhelming majority of the delays and cost overruns could have been avoided if not for the withholding of necessary funds. Today, they are used as a talking point for one purpose alone: to reduce federal funding for the most scientifically valuable missions of all, NASA's flagship missions.

There is a lesson from all of this. The problem was stated most clearly by Nicholas Samios, the former director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. When speaking about the SSC's cancellation, here's what he said:

You can blame lots of people, but it was clearly a lack of will. We always got things done. It turned a getting-things-done society into a conservative, play-it-safe, no-risk society. We’re not made of the right stuff anymore.

We have already lost particle physics, the capacity for future deep-space missions, and the capability to take human beings beyond low-Earth orbit. While there are calls to bring crewed exploration back in various long-range capacities, the latest proposal comes with an unnecessary cost: gutting the science that made America great to begin with.

Hubble is perhaps the best example of what we can accomplish by dreaming big. As Neil de Grasse Tyson noted back in 2008 for Parade Magazine,

More research papers have been published using its data than have ever been published for any other scientific instrument in any discipline.

That was more than a decade ago, and Hubble continues to be the most sought-after observatory on (or beyond) planet Earth. Nobody doubts that its initial $5 billion cost was more than worth it, or considers the total $15-$20 billion spent over its lifetime to be a poor investment. We have revolutionized our view of the Universe in ways we could not have possibly anticipated prior to its launch. That is what NASA flagship missions can do like nothing else.

NASA was started in 1959, and as its budget soared throughout the 1960s, so did our accomplishments in both space exploration and in science. Throughout the post-Apollo years, however, the budget steadily dropped, with only a bump in the Bush (Sr.) years bucking that trend. Today, NASA's budget is less than 0.5% of total federal expenditures, with science making up nearly a third of what NASA does, divided into four subdivisions: astrophysics, planetary science, Earth science, and heliophysics.

And that's why the latest budget, released on March 11th by the Trump administration, is so terrifying in its boldness for destroying science research, education, and development in the United States. Amidst a record-breaking $4.7 trillion budget, NASA's funding is being slashed to a record-low of 0.45% of federal expenditures (a level not seen since 1960), with science, NASA astrophysics, and STEM outreach targeted for the greatest cuts.

In 2018, the Trump administration's proposed FY2019 budget was a disaster for science, with deep cuts for NASA, the Department of Education, the Chemical Safety Board, the National Science Foundation and many more. It was plainly an anti-science budget, which would be disastrous for not only America, but for practically every state across the board. Congress was able to restore much of the funding that was proposed to be eliminated, and the budget passed.

This year's proposed FY2020 budget has now been announced, and it's as equally disastrous for science as last year's proposal, but this time it's more insidious. By emphasizing space exploration and increasing funding for the lunar gateway project — which is arguably a good project on its own merits — it obscures the fact that it gets its funding by destroying many of our most important and scientifically valuable programs.

This time, there's a shuffle planned for NASA, and it's designed to kill the very idea of flagship missions while dropping the overall science funding to record-low levels. Here are the biggest changes over what we're presently doing:

1. The science budget is being cut across the board by 8.7% ($603 million): the largest single-year decrease in history.
2. The James Webb Space Telescope budget is being split off from the NASA astrophysics budget while WFIRST is killed entirely: this signals the end of the flagship mission program that makes NASA, well, NASA, according to Science Mission Directorate head Thomas Zurbuchen.
3. Last year, acting administrator Robert Lightfoot's statement acknowledged the deep cuts that would harm science; this year's statement by Jim Bridenstine lauds the new initiatives but doesn't even mention that these cuts are occurring.
4. Emphasizes small-mission funding and continuation for existing missions at the expense of long-term and future missions.
5. Reduces planetary science, Earth science, and heliophysics funding, as well as astrophysics funding.
6. Eliminates the office of STEM outreach, along with its portfolio of grants and cooperative agreements.

The most optimistic take on the President's FY2020 proposal is this: there is bipartisan support for a United States with a strong science program across the board. WFIRST is the top priority space mission, as ranked by the National Academy of Sciences; NASA is doing what the scientific community has recommended to them as a whole by flying these flagship missions. Hubble, James Webb, and WFIRST are transformative observatories, and we can stop the President's short-sighted recommendations from becoming law.

But the budget proposal also declares that as long as he is in office, this will likely be an annual fight. A single year of missed funding or underfunding can kill a project that took decades to plan and enact. We must not lose our will. Our future and present demands that we not lose sight of a record-breaking cut to the greatest human endeavor of all: the quest to understand our existence.

After Selling Her Genetic Data Mining Software Company, A 32-Year-Old CEO Relaunches It With A Microsoft Partnership

Spiral Genetics CEO Adina Mangubat participated in a panel at the 2018 Forbes Under 30 Summit in Boston.JULIA FERRIER

As a 22-year-old recent college graduate with a psychology degree, Adina Mangubat founded a software company to address a need that was just emerging in 2009: analyzing the huge amounts of data generated from sequencing whole human genomes.

DNA sequencing was still very expensive and rare at the time, but Mangubat and her cofounders at Spiral Genetics anticipated a day when the cost of sequencing a genome would drop enough to allow scientists to sequence hundreds of thousands or millions of human genomes, whole populations, and compare them to learn about disease. To analyze such a volume of data, with the technology of the time, would have been prohibitively difficult and time-consuming, Mangubat predicted. Her company aimed to leverage cloud-based computing to crunch those huge gene sets, taking a fraction of the time.

“At the time there was a lot of discomfort around the marrying of software and genomics,” says Mangubat, a member of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for Science and Healthcare in 2012. It was difficult to find investors with expertise in both areas, she says, or one who was willing to make a bet in an sector they didn’t understand. Spiral Genetics raised $5 million in venture capital before genomic data software firm Omicia, now Fabric Genomics, bought it in 2017 for an undisclosed amount.

But a year after the acquisition, Mangubat says she felt the focus of the company shift from the population-level analysis she had in mind when she founded the company to the clinical market of analyzing individual patient genomes. Now, Mangubat is relaunching Spiral as a separate company focused on comparing the whole genome data of large populations after taking it through Y Combinator’s latest accelerator session. Spiral is working with three countries and two academic institutions, and is one of Microsoft’s many genomics partners working on its Azure cloud computing platform.

“They have specialized in a particular implementation of technology that allows us to aggregate, harmonize, and compare large populations of whole human genomes,” says Desney Tan, general manager of Microsoft Healthcare. “The current methodologies [for genomic analysis] just do not scale in the way we believe Spiral Genetics’ technology will be able to.”

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Microsoft is partnering with Spiral and an academic researcher to test machine-learning techniques on a database of patients with cardiovascular disease, looking for genetic markers that predict disease. It’s also working with countries doing large genomic studies to develop their own baselines and custom references for comparisons. Since genetics can vary from population to population, the current references might not accurately reflect what is standard in a given country. The reference genome used in comparisons is mostly Caucasian, for example, and using it as a standard for non-Caucasian populations will miss genetic differences, Mangubat says.

Countrywide genome-sequencing projects are producing “the largest data sets on the planet,” Mangubat says. Spiral’s goal is to make sense of them.

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Journey To Senior Status

Jaquan Frierson is a fourth year student studying mechanical engineering at Wayne State University and a guest contributor for Reach Higher

I am Jaquan Frierson, a fourth year Mechanical Engineering student at Wayne State University. I graduated from Cass Tech High School in Detroit, Michigan, and I hope to one day use my degree to start my own business in the engineering field—though I already own an LLC. Throughout high school, I was known as the guy that rapped and sold candy by many of the students, and I was also thought of as a pretty smart student by my teachers and classmates—though my grades may not have reflected that in the beginning due to circumstances outside of school. I had always known I would go to college and get a degree in something math related, so I made sure that I did my absolute best to bring my grades as high as possible so that they would pay for my education.

Jaquan meets former First Lady Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson with his classmates. MICHELLE OBAMA PERSONAL OFFICE

As I was finishing out strong in high school—finally getting the grades that I wanted, having acceptance letters from each college that I had applied to and leaving one of the best schools in the city—I was set on going to college and showing out. I remember going to Reach Higher’s College Signing Day in 2015 proud to have an opportunity akin to what athletes get every year and proud to represent Wayne State University because it was the only university I had ever planned on attending. When I walked across the stage and grabbed my diploma, I was already a step ahead of my father’s academic achievements and was determined to go a step further than my mother’s achievements, making me a first-generation college student. I began my college experience engulfed in a sea of people so large that I could not help but show the world through social media something so foreign to me and, in that moment, almost everyone was since I was not followed to this university by many of my friends.

I began classes still determined to show just how smart I was, overlooking the fact that I had no money or job and that textbooks were not cheap or even affordable. I had to speak with each of my professors privately to tell them that while I did not have the materials required, I was trying to obtain an on-campus job and was just waiting to hear back. Amazingly, my first professors turned out to be blessings with one buying me the book I needed for his math course and with another allowing me to use her i>clicker so that I would not lose points until I could afford my own. Eventually, I would finally get a call back while ending a small group meeting with one of the Christian organizations on campus that my roommate and I had hastily joined. My new friends and I ran to drop off my class schedule, all eager for me to start my first real job. Once I began working, I informed my instructors and told them that I would soon be able to pay them back or return their items and they were happy for me; my math professor even told me not to worry about it and use my first check to get myself something.

Jaquan is a fourth year Mechanical Engineering student at Wayne State University. @MICHELLEOBAMA

The semesters and school years continued each bringing new struggles and great experiences. Some semesters were rough, causing me to almost lose certain academic scholarships or struggle to pay for housing while others were much stronger academically and less financially taxing. The rough academic semesters were however another blessing. Some semesters saw me struggle both financially and academically, the latter sometimes a result of the former. While all academic costs were never a concern due to scholarships and grants dedicated completely to tuition, I would find myself working as many hours as I could to pay for housing and my meal plan. This caused me to struggle in my classes which then led me to being referred to a job in the math department by my mentor where I would work for one of his friends in a work study position which would allow me to able to spend some of my time studying while earning a higher wage than my other job, where I had been promoted to a student lead position, all while being around many of the resources I needed to improve my math skills.

While at this new job, I met and bonded with people that I otherwise likely would have never met and gained opportunities that I would not have had. These students would eventually become a large part of the community that helped me achieve the most success. This success came both in and out of school. While I now had friends to study with and ask questions while doing class work, my work study job became additional summer employment and would eventually be instrumental in my being able to move into my first apartment after being kicked out of my parents house; it would be my highest paying job in the summer where I worked three jobs to ensure I would be able to keep my apartment.

Jaquan with Keegan-Michael Key. JAQUAN FRIERSON

College has given me many new and positive experiences such as meeting different people from around the world, my first real, long term relationship with my girlfriend, my first parties—though there weren’t many—a Christian presence to keep me grounded while being on my own, friendships with people who have similar goals and motivations that could possibly be life long, the chance to network with other artists and musicians and perform my songs on campus, and most recently the chance to meet Keegan-Michael Key and Michelle Obama almost four years after her College Signing Day event where I was so proud to be representing Wayne State University. While these are just a few of the highlights in this crazy experience it shows how and why college is such an important life experience to have.

Through the good and the bad, high and low GPAs, and all the stress that came with it, my college experience is one that I would not trade or change for anything, and I would encourage everyone who is given such an amazing opportunity to take it. College has helped me grow and mature in such profound ways outside of just education and has prepared me for a future where everything may not always go my way but I know I can always persevere to success.

This Is Why The Multiverse Must Exist